The Werner Sollors Reader: Ethnicity, Cosmopolitanism and Particularism (forthcoming, January 2025), is the first comprehensive overview of Werner Sollors’ ground-breaking work on culture and ethnicity. The collected essays are complemented by a detailed introduction by Daniel G. Williams which foregrounds some of the key emphases and tensions in Sollors’ writings.

Read the recent Harvard Magazine feature about Sollors’ work here: “A More Generous, Capacious America”

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures.

About the Speakers

Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard Univerity. He served as chair of Afro-American Studies from 1984 through 1987 and from 1988 through 1990, of American Civilization from 1997-2002, and of Ethnic Studies from 2001 through 2004 and in academic year 2009-10.  His most recent book is The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940s (2014). In 2012 he prepared an expanded centennial edition of Mary Antin’s The Promised Land and a Norton Critical Edition of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. He has edited, coedited, and collaborated on numerous books. He has written essays on ethnicity, pluralism, migration, multiculturalism, and numerous individual authors, among them Olaudah Equiano, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Antin, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Roth, Richard Wright, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Johnson. Recently he contributed to Daedalus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Amerikastudien, Comparative American Studies, The Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the volumes The Harvard Sampler and The Turn Around Religion. His lectures and essays “Americans All,”  “Goodbye Germany,” “Multilingual America,” and “Obligations to Negroes Who Would Be Kin if They Were not Negroes” have been posted on the web. He is the recipient of Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was awarded the Constance Rourke award for the best essay in American Quarterly and the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award at Harvard University. A corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie, he was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and of the Academia Europaea in 2012.

Daniel Gwydion Williams is Personal Chair of English Literature at Swansea University. He is a cultural critic and one of Wales’ leading public intellectuals. His research interests range from the 19th century to the present day and encompass Welsh language and English language literatures on both sides of the Atlantic. These interests are linked by a concern with questions of nationalism, ethnicity and identity.